THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE DOMINION.

In 1867, the year of Confederation, the realized and available wealth of British North America, including Newfoundland besides all that now composes the Dominion, was estimated by a competent authority at one thousand, one hundred and thirty-six million dollars. This included only the sum of private property, exclusive of railways, canals, public buildings, and all property that belonged to the public domain, as also of lands not in farms, lumber, mines and fisheries. It was estimated in 1870 that these same values had increased

by at least five hundred million dollars. Development has been continued another decade-rapidly for the first three years following 1870, and much more slowly since 1874.

During most of these six years the world at large suffered under great financial depression. Great difficulties surrounded many of the larger enterprises of business. General values were diminished and the activities of capital and enterprise were seriously restrained. Yet the same actual property existed and continued to increase. Prosperity did not seem as great as it actually was from the greater slowness of interchanges and difficulty of immediately realizing their ordinary value. They were as fictitiously low as, in times of brisk movement and financial buoyancy, they were fictitiously high. At the close of the decade commencing with 1870 the realized wealth of the Dominion must have been equal to three thousand million dollars, at least, besides a very great improvement in the facilities and instruments with which a much larger relative increase was to be made in the future. Nearly three thousand miles of railroad had been built during these ten years, costing perhaps $175,000,000, and adding

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as much to the value of lands and property lying near them. Probably the increased facilities of transportation doubled the capacity of the people to produce results.

The immediate value of these business facilities could be realized only in part for want of the accustomed ability of markets to clear themselves, or to receive on the same scale as formerly. Financial troubles diminished purchases and sales at once. Yet a slow but very solid improvement went on in many ways not readily observable at the first general glance. When general financial pressure should be removed it would become apparent that the Dominion was vastly richer and capable of a much greater momentum and speed of progress. The United States was the first among the nations to recover from this depression, and the real progress there under an apparent decay of prosperity became immediately evident. The experience of Canada must be similar since its natural resources are similarly great, and the preparation for realizing them was perhaps as great in proportion to its inhabitants and means. It is even probable that, if an equally lively state of business activity should bring into full use all the increased facilities for production, at the end of two years of such prosperity the whole realized wealth of all Canada would be found equal to five thousand millions of dollars.

This would certainly place Canada on a comparative level with the eminently prosperous Republic, and even a considable per cent more. She has no vast reserves of wealth, but values are much more evenly distributed. She has few paupers, few unproductive and idle classes, few large cities and manufacturing centers to gather hundreds of thousands of operatives who make a bare living from year to year, without power to improve their future. Most of her people are scattered over her vast territory as agriculturists, and, if they realize but a moderately comfortable living for the present, their labor continually tends to prepare a better one for the future. Wealth, or capital, is better distributed; it is therefore more

profitably employed in proportion as it falls into the hands of a large number of small proprietors, who employ it under their own eye, and apply their own labor and thrifty prudence to its increase.

A new country grows, accumulates, more rapidly in proportion than an older one. Canada may hope to lessen considerably the great sum of present disproportion between her wealth and that of older countries, because she builds chiefly on new foundations and increase has more the character of a creation than that obtained from the earnings of capital invested. She has also a great advantage as well as a disadvantage in having her fairest, most populous and productive regions separated by only a conventional line from the most prosperous regions of the United States. Institutions and business being fairly free on each side of that line, and the habits and character of the people similar for thrift, enterprise and vigor, prosperity will not be easily confined to one side of it. Business, to a greater extent than appears at first view, sets at naught International Lines and Tariffs. If these prove to be dams that prevent a free flow backward and forward to a certain height, when activity becomes great and prosperity rises high on one side it flows over the barriers by a necessary law.

Thus conventional law finds its limit of power very much narrowed by the action of natural law. Although Canada is, by conventional law or political relations, closely connected with England, natural law or business relations associate it much more closely with the United States. Its imports from the Republic, in 1878, exceeded those from Great Britain by eleven million dollars. Lumber has been in recent years about 95 per cent of the exports from Canada to the United States, and, in the years 1876-7-8 the goods entered at its custom houses for consumption from the United States exceeded those entered from Great Britain by about $30,000,000. All this was in the face of high tariffs in the Republic, and the

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absence of such cordial commercial relations as the interests of trade in each country demanded.

The interests of business are sometimes made secure under international laws, treaties and courtesies that form a new and significant feature of more modern national intercourse. While yet the Pacific Railway between the Eastern Provinces and Manitoba was incomplete, a branch of that future system was constructed from the capital of Manitoba southward, and it was met at the International Boundary by an American road connected with the general system of the United States. This again was in connection at many points with the CanaIdian system. A system of bonding regulations for goods permitted continuous transport from Canada through more than a thousand miles of the United States territory to Dominion soil again in Manitoba. So also one of the longest lines of railway in Canada has a western terminus in Chicago and an eastern in Portland, on the Atlantic; and the railway systems of the United States and Canada are adjusted to each other so as to promote the requirements of business in either country, as perfectly, under tariff restrictions, as possible. All this has continued many years, has led to very intimate business relations, and seems sure to result, sooner or later, in commercial interchanges between the Republic and the Dominion almost as free as those between the different States of the former.

The best machinery for manufacturing and for the farm, the most intelligent methods and the most convenient implements of agriculture successfully used by the Anglo-Americans very soon find their way into Canada, thus establishing real reciprocity in all fields of progress, intellectual and practical, not immediately related to political affairs. By this means the powerfully progressive spirit that has been maturing among Anglo-Americans for two and a half centuries is communicated much more completely to Canadians than to European nations, or any other American nation. Retaining English

principles and methods of government they are highly receptive of the business principles and methods of Americans. So the tendencies are to uniformity with the United States in the last and to diversity in the first. Inspired by the example and success of their neighbors, as well as possessing, inherently, the qualities that have made England the most powerful country of the nineteenth century, having obtained full control over their own affairs and important credit with English capitalists, Canadians have addressed themselves to the task of developing a new country with vigor, skill, and a very real

success.

In 1868 the total commerce of the Dominion amounted to something more than $130,000,000. Since 1870 it has averaged fully $180,000,000-sometimes rising much above $200,000,000. It had much less than one-tenth the population and wealth of the Republic, yet its commercial business has been about one-sixth as much. Its public debt is now about onetwelfth that of the Republic, but it has all been employed in public works, most of those tending to increase the business facilities of the country, so that the expenditure has increased, by several times, the value of the property of its population and the annual income from that property. The wealth it creates can well afford to pay the interest on the debt and provide a sinking fund to extinguish it.

A small nation, widely scattered, with agriculture as the occupation of the mass of its people, it is the fourth in rank among the nations of the world in the number of its vessels and capacity of its merchant marine-the first being England, the second the United States, and the third France. With so good a start, with a railway connection between the two oceans and through the richest regions of its vast territory to be developed in the future, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it will soon reach, and ever hold, the third place among commercial nations. Its Eastern Maritime Provinces -so near Europe, the commercial section by eminence of the